During my time at Columbia College I took a course titled Semiotics of Creative Culture, taught by a brilliant proffesor by the name of Herbert Allen. Out of the many things Herbert shared with us I will never forget the quote "Image Sees, Image Feels, Image Acts", It refers to the idea that in a visual culture the images we see ultimately effect how we feel which eventually effect how we act. Under this principle, media artists are prescribed with a big responsibility. The things we create will effect society and by the use of semiotics we can structure the meaning thoughtfully, so as to generate a positive outcome.

Over the course of the semester each student developed a portfolio compiled of different analyses around a thesis, my work revolved around "The platform of messages". I started looking into the different ways we broadcast and it has been my goal to understand the varying modalities of broadcast and reception as it relates to the medium and the audience. The next few essays are excerpts from this portfolio.

During my time at Columbia College I took a course titled Semiotics of Creative Culture, taught by a brilliant proffesor by the name of Herbert Allen. Out of the many things Herbert shared with us I will never forget the quote "Image Sees, Image Feels, Image Acts", It refers to the idea that in a visual culture the images we see ultimately effect how we feel which eventually effect how we act. Under this principle, media artists are prescribed with a big responsibility. The things we create will effect society and by the use of semiotics we can structure the meaning thoughtfully, so as to generate a positive outcome.

Over the course of the semester each student developed a portfolio compiled of different analyses around a thesis, my work revolved around "The platform of messages". I started looking into the different ways we broadcast and it has been my goal to understand the varying modalities of broadcast and reception as it relates to the medium and the audience. The next few essays are excerpts from this portfolio.

Signifier: Progression of “The message comes with time”/ public messages
conveyed in a familiar fashion with a twist of syntagm.

My initial spark for researching the platform of messages came one night in
the beginning of the semester. I was lying in bed thinking about how as a designer I
am held responsible with relaying information. Like a gatekeeper, I hold the key to
the garden of ideas. What a responsibility. We could look at this and say that
designers don't hold too much clout, if a client has a message they could give it to a
thousand and one designers and end up with a thousand and one solutions;
Solutions that would most likely meet the requirements of the client, it would be
trendy, low in cost and memorable. That is all well and good and for a while, that
was enough. But upon further investigation I decided that no, that was not good
enough. Designers are the architects of culture they assign the visual identity to our
cognitive process. They take an idea and breath life into it, they prescribe it culture,
universal truths, humanity and breath. These aesthetic breadcrumbs become road
maps in our daily routines. They remind us of our universal initiative and ground us
in the collective identity. Design principles become so ingrained in our culture and
vice versa that we start to see that a color palette and a typeface surpass their
original objectification. They become personified. This is why we can look at a
palette of earthy oranges and soft browns and say the seventies, or bright neon and
geometrics and say “the eighties”. This is why we can look at a sign set in Times New
Roman and be brought back to a feeling of general academic nostalgia. By the words
of designer Lawrence Weiner “Words don't start off being cultural, intellectual or
intelligent…Designers create star-maps, they set up a pattern for people to
understand where they are and from that they can determine what it is they want to
do.” So there it stands, designers must accept this responsibility and respect it. In
their repertoire not only will designers be versed in the structural components of
design, they should investigate the vehicles for which they relay and relate. By
understanding the soap box we can better engineer the message. That night while
thinking I conceptualized the project which I am about to analyze, It is the child
which began this journey. Designers have many titles I like to assign to them, moral
agents, visual pirates, ideological entrepreneurs and now this new direction will be
under the pseudonym “design scientists” aka “visicists”. In this field of study my
exploration will be to unlock the truths in our varying platforms for broadcast,
conducting experiments with design in mind. We will classify this under the title
“mental processes for engineering culture by aesthetic principle”. So without further
adieu lets begin.

The project denotatively is simple. Broadcast a message over a long period of
time, unveiling a character a day. The posters are placed in my window four stories
above the street. They measure 18”x24” and the type choice is Franklyn Gothic Bold.
The process is somewhat ritualistic, every night before I went to bed I replaced the
poster and marked off the letter on a check list I created corresponding with the
date. Every morning I would immediately go to the street and take a picture of my
window (I got some strange looks while doing this). The character would then stay
in my window for the remainder of the day until I replace it again in the evening.

The message itself is key. Originally I was thinking about using some song
lyrics or a beautiful quote, something uplifting. But quickly realized that in doing so I
was introducing extra elements to the project which would cast it in a different light.
The message isn't intended to be uplifting, spiritual, cultural etc. It's an equation
made of individual sums towards a calculated whole, but in this case the whole is
not the end all be all, it is in effect a reverse gestalt. There is no great pay off in the
end when/ if a viewer puts all the letters together. They realize that they are
concluded with a piece of information that has already been accepted. After day two
it goes without saying that a message will be coming in time. The only thing that is
undetermined is for how long. Of course this requires a certain amount of
investment by the viewer, if the characters aren't viewed in succession then the
message is lost and for those who begin experiencing the message half way through
it is up to them to fill in the beginning and decide what level of investment they want
to give the message.

The sytagmatic approach to this message sets us up with some interesting
variables. The message is a response to the over abundance of rapid message relay
systems widely used in contemporary society. SMS, Ichat, Facebook, digital adverts,
etc. On average about 4.1 billion texts are sent every day, numbers show that about
14 texts a day on average are sent by a single person, however many teens average
in the thousands and there is still a good share of people who do not have SMS
enabled on their mobile device. Yahoo tech writer Ben Patterson gives the following
example to put this into a different light.

“An SMS has a maximum capacity of 160 characters, so let's say (for the sake
of example) that your average text message is about 80 characters long. And let's
assume that your average novel contains about 100,000 words, and each word has
about five letters. So … assuming all that, we here in the States are writing the
equivalent of about 656,000 books, all via SMS, every 24 hours. At that rate, we
could match the entire catalog of the entire New York Public Library system (which
holds about 20.4 million books) in a little over a month. 2008 set the current record for a full year with one trillion total messages, and this
year (given stable traffic for the rest of the year), that number should be surpassed
by 50 percent or more.” *

Keep in mind that these statistics only account for text messages, which is
only one slice of our message intake appetite. From my research the most common
number I've seen for commercial messages viewed in a day is 3,000. This seems at
first a little unreasonable, but when considering a diet of newspaper, TV, public
transit, street walking, school and errands the picture becomes a little bit clearer.
Perhaps we are not cognitively engaging in these messages but they do become
apart of our visual consumption.

My message is constructed from a paradigm. From the world of accelerated
abbreviated communication, the message over time is an opposite response to explore the possibility of a message being recognized if it is not in the standard
format. The message is also a call to action. The connotations of the new information
age result in information being ready available, implying that there is no push to
learn. The initiative to critically analyze and reflect material is being stifled by a
medium to simply allocate and regurgitate. A good example of this is the trivia game
theory. Before Personal Digital Assistant (PDA's) a trivia game would be structured
around an accumulated body of knowledge. In theory the broader the range of
knowledge in a group the higher chances they have of winning the game. Culturally,
digital devices have conditioned us to be co-dependant. If there is no push for us to
“learn” then we will suspend our capability. In a modern day trivia atmosphere the
game becomes less about intertextuality and more about synchronization. Meaning,
how fast can you type something into your iphone after a question has been asked.
To expand this we see that the social implications are on a much larger scale,
information is regarded as an extension that is taken for granted. Much like mobility
or running water. If these things were all of a sudden to “give out” we would be left
helpless. It's an interesting metaphor to consider, all our egg's are in one basket.

When relating back to the viewer, it would be expecting a lot to think that
they would understand this specific directive in terms of my message but they are
not held accountable. There is no hidden agenda behind these letters simply an
exploration; all analysis so far is simply speculative. However the viewer may be
more readily receptive to the message due to its iconographic traits. For example
the posters are hung in a window of a run down apartment building, you can see the
creases in the paper as well as the sloppy tape job around the edges. The overall
image of these artifacts implies a home made, low budget DIY type endeavor. This is
huge. It sets the first impression as something that is the opposite of commercial, yet
another paradigm. By making this gesture I would hope that already the viewer
would be curious enough to enquire more into the results. I'm creating a symbol, a
symbol that needs to be committed to in order to understand fully. The sense of
humanism interpellates the public and invites them to be apart of a conversation.
This conversation is directly reflected upon them as people rather than consumers.
There is no phone number, no brand identity no motive attached to the message;
Merely a puzzle.

I have not received any feedback from this message in terms of “cracking the
code” or rather sticking it out to the end. I have debated over putting up a poster to
ask for reactions leaving an address for direct mail. But the beauty and aura of this
message is embedded in the ambiguity. In all reality I have said nothing, I've only
demonstrated a truth. I could perhaps get into an existential question regarding a
cultural code on patience and integrity, saying that when we are patient and become
the drivers to our patterns that questions in our life will inevitably unfold. But not
this time, this message is not the soapbox, it's just a tool. Conceivably it's possible
that this message did directly affect a person, it may have been provocative enough
to alter the course of someone's daily navigation. Perhaps people did go out of their
way to find a conclusion. Whether it is creating order out of chaos, solving the
mystery, a symbol of hope or a vehicle of fear and anxiety. We will leave those
feelings with the people because it is theirs and in whatever way it was interpreted
it will stand as truth for the individual regardless of what I instigate. In the days
when I would sit in my window and smoke cigarettes I could see peoples heads
move upward towards the message. Whether casually or with intent I may never
know. But I do know that for that specific time frame they were engaging.

Side note: I received a call from my landlord half way through the project, she said
that the church across the street had called and was worried that the person making
the message was summoning or calling upon something dark. I went over to the
church to ask about the complaint. Every single person I talked to in the office was
completely ignorant to what I was talking about.